Izzi, yes, I got that email announcement also. An amazing piece of software for sure!

I did hand coding (with the help of CC's HTML Editor) for a number of years, but when it got to the point of needing a responsive site, I knew I wouldn't be hand coding that! Thanks to the incredibly smart folks at CoffeeCup, RSD came along just in time! At one point I considered other solutions, but for me, I like having the control over the layout at the breakpoints, which RSD does brilliantly.

Yes, I too had to spend some time wrapping my mind around how the layout should change at different screen sizes. I'm mostly happy with the layout I've done. My best advice would be to just try different things. Create test pages and then resize the browser window to see how things change and if you like the changes as the size gets smaller. You're not going to break the software by doing a lot of test pages. I figures out or stumbled upon more of what works (or doesn't work) by just trying things. If I over think things, then I get into trouble.

for sure michael, overthinking... ugh.

Coming soon - Beautifully Crafted modern Responsive themes using RSD

www.on2themes.com

Here's my RSD effort - simple but hopefully effective (for customers)
www.mottonterraces.com.au
There are probably quite a few 'wrong' things with it in terms of how I've organised pages and settings etc. but the client (me) is happy enough with it.
Would there be any benefit to others to see the corresponding RSD project? Or would that somehow compromise the security of my site?

@Flemming I liked the site, but I don't know why the photos open so slow. Did you resize them to the largest version you are using? It takes a little while to do it, but the pay off is great. Also I just updated my host service to the cloud and could not believe the difference in load times. I liked the site!

Hi Flemming, I love the colors you use. I agree with Izzi the images are killing you. Even on my PC the background image and other images are taking a very long time to load. Resize and compress them for much faster load times.

Thanks Izzi and Steve for the feedback on the site. We are on a rather slow connection (although it is nominally called ‘broadband’) that we get used to slow loads so it’s hard to judge.
The background image is 273KB - something I had overlooked and given it’s only background, it can be reduced substantially overall. When it comes to the tablet/phone breakpoints it can be removed entirely. The logo can also be reduced without losing definition.
The images on each main page range from 80KB to 140KB. They are all set to 700 px (done in Paintshop Pro) and I can see the value of reducing the sizes for the menu item pages where the pictures are only just for aesthetics and definitely less than 700 px.
The images that link from the Gallery page have to be a reasonable size but I can also fiddle them. I realise now that it is possible to have a totally different picture at breakpoints so I am assuming it’s good practice to use lower resolution images for the smaller screen sizes.
Some questions:
• Steve you mention resizing and compressing – do you mean using things like JPG files and image editing programs?
• What is considered a good image size (in terms of KB) for say a PC, table or smartphone?
• What is considered a reasonable overall KB size for a web page to load to a PC – what about a smartphone?

All that and more is covered in our Website Insight application. It also has tools that help you compress your images and files! I would recommend downloading the trial and giving it a once over. It will scan your page and tell you all the recommendations for that page.

If you have any questions, open up a support topic and we would be happy to help!

@Fleming... re: photo resizing. I probably have an un-orthodox rule of thumb for dealing with photos is that is to reduce their size to the largest size I would be using on any given web site. Its usually something within a 450 x 300 pixel range. Then I save it as a ''high'' optimization (as opposed to 100%) because usually the difference is so slight to the eye, and so significant to the page load time, I opt for ''high''. I also play with 24-bit png format too. For vectors, I love converting them to .svg format since they stay crisp both large and small. I don't know how your server time effects how things download to my server when I open stuff up. That all is still a bit of a mystery for me. But if I were you, sincer servers are international for the most part, get with a company that will put you on the cloud... to my surprise it makes a huge difference. I just upgraded with my host server and its a wow. It takes a lot of time to resize and ''fix up'' photos (make them look sharper, higher contrast, take out ugly stuff) but the end product is the viewer visiting that site, so I think its time well spent. Photos are a great asset to a site for the most part. The times they are not is when they load slow. Its tricky to balance it all out right.

@Fleming....I'm all over the face of the map right now with responsive web design, having coded both Foundation and Bootstrap grids (fun but time consuming for me) and testing several programs beside Coffee Cup. Four other programs. Two quickly fell by the wayside, and I use one now that, thanks to Coffee Cup's standalone apps, will allow me to use the best of both worlds. Right now my sites are simple beyond simple. But that's a great leap for me in understanding really. I notice a lot of the resizing of photos is done really well by the devices too. So that's a pleasant surprise. I edit with Photoshop, but every decent bitmap editor should do just about the same things. When I do my layout, I see where the photos will go, and like I say, photos on web sites inside the body don't look good if they are too big, unless its the back ground. 400 to 500 pixels wide, 300 to 400 pixels tall -- that's plenty big. That one thing really knocks the weight down to size. I do a ''save for the web'' option and have a few choices of saving from low to top quality... and I choose 60% quality and for the most part works pretty good. The responsive programs seem to deal with the images pretty good automatically, but the one program I use now gives me the option to ''resize the photo by percentage'' and I'm sure coffee cup has the same thing, for when you are going into those page breaks. I try to avoid text and photo wraps on the internet too. There's a lot of new tricks to this responsive web design to make it look good. I think you did a great job on your site.